Felipe Bassi takes us through the creation of his 3D version of Brett Bean's Pirate.

Introduction

I chose the awesome concept made by Brett Bean as a feature in my modeling reel. The first time I saw the image I knew that I was going to model it and so when I started to choose concepts for my reel - that was instantly my choice.

In this Making Of, I will show the steps I took to create this character. I like this workflow because of the freedom that gives me to focus on the artistic part of the modeling in the early steps. At the first stage the only thing I worry about is good silhouette, posture and nice shapes - all the technical parts like topology and UVs are in a completely different stage of the process.

Step 1: Sketch in ZBrush

I started with ZSphere inside ZBrush. The main objective at this stage is to get the right proportions and posture. Even in a neutral pose, with the right posture you can determine what kind of personality the character has.

The basic model sculpted with a ZSphere

Step 2: Sculpting the main shapes

After I got a good silhouette I started to separate the pieces and sculpt the main shapes. At this stage I didn't need fine details, but things like folds in the clothes are important since it was going to be on the topology later on. Here's my final sketch read ready for re-topology.

Get the major details and forms in your model

Step 3: Retopology

It was then time for the technical stuff that I was talking about in the introduction. I always start with the body, since all the clothes go on top of the body, so for me it makes more sense to model in this order. At this stage I paid extra attention to the topology as this character was designed for animation. I retopologize all the pieces.

(ID: 290144, pid: 0) Moustafa Shaheen on Sun, 03 August 2014 1:43am hey , thank you for making this tutorial , it was so useful for me and i watched your reel , it was awesome !

(ID: 270847, pid: 0) Vesta on Sun, 27 April 2014 6:22am Amazing work! I like it!
I have some questions only.
Step 3 and step 4 look the same ( in the text), I think the in the step 4 something should be about adding details on the model. And It`s interesting for me, how looks Glossiness map for this character. I think, it is not the same as Specular map. Am i right?